Martin Dust
Techno Zen Master
Hmm... on relistening to Draft 7.30 I am reminded of why its such a disengaging album- the lack of any particular atmosphere. I never heard Autechre as cold, inhuman, as they hooked into weird emotions and nameless psychological states in a way which made their music genuinely modern/post modern machine-psychedelic. Confield has that dank dreadful atmosphere of microscopic gloom, nameless techno-Lovecraftian things breeding and rising to walk on hideous crippled limbs... Chiastic Slide has a different ambiance of alien-industrial Oriental mechanical exotica, lush and wet and arranged at curious impossible angles like cubist jazz, with those unplaceable oneiric sounds building right at the edges of the perceptible sound field (and strangely early Grime-like at times with its palette of string stabs and wonkily syncopated funk)... Daft 7.30 never coheres into anything evocative, it fails to achieve any resonance in my imagination...
Great reply and post, I love it for all the reason you don't